Career Switch: Mahesh M Shares His Success Story

Every month, new AcadGild students are landing plum jobs in the software industry, hence, we decided to find out more about what life after finishing a course at AcadGild looks like. Read to find out more about an inspiring story of a student who makes “career switch” look like a walk in the park.
We recently caught up with a graduate from the 12-week online immersive Big Data and Hadoop Development course to see where life has taken him.
Mahesh, until a couple of years ago, found himself chugging toward professional glory in academia. With solid degrees (bachelors and masters) in Computer Science and Engineering, he made sure to leave no stone unturned on his way to rising to the echelons of successful computer science scholars. His years spent researching enriched him with unique research and educational experiences.
After graduating, he started his career as expected – a tenure-track Assistant Professor with S.J.M. Institute of Technology at Chitradurga (Karnataka, India) in the Computer Science department – while constantly working toward rising to the level of an Associate Professor and beyond. In his short stint as an Assistant Professor (2.3 years), Mahesh managed to author a whopping eight technical research papers (three international and five national), which speaks oodles about his research acumen!
Basically, Mahesh had landed himself in a safe and familiar field and was doing absolutely fantastic in his chosen career. He even wished to get his PhD from one of the premiere institutes in the country, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, for which he indulged in some heavy groundwork for two years.
But life had different plans for him. He got rejected owing to a fierce competition and his career in research ground to a halt. Though by then, the universe of big data had already caught his fancy. But it turned out, this was a field in which he had limited contacts, few applicable skills, and absolutely no idea what to put on his resume. A career switch looked scary at that point.
Mahesh nevertheless decided to trudge on toward his new goals, when in fact to most of us, it almost seems easier to just stay put—even if we spend our days dreaming about doing something else.
“I became passionate about big data and Hadoop technologies and started looking for jobs seriously in this domain.” His mantra: Never say never.
Mahesh knew though transitions are tough, they are not impossible—one just needs to take a strategic approach to the move.
In fact, transitioning from academia to corporate is not that hard at all, since one finds themselves already familiar with project management, presentation delivery, and writing—which could all be easily transposed into a corporate setting.
Mahesh then decided to evaluate his skills and compared them to the needs of the corporate world. Right off the bat, there were some that he did not have. Hence, his search for the perfect online course to help him upskill in the field of big data began.
“Before planning to join courses in big data and Hadoop, I researched for some good bootcamps that offered them,” reflected Mahesh. His search eventually led him to AcadGild at Bangalore, nestled bang in the center of India’s “Silicon Valley” in Bengaluru.
“I found some good feedback from AcadGild’s alumni and decided to personally visit their office at Bangalore with my friend, where we got to interact with the technical team. A reassuring interaction with the team gave my friend and I the much-required confidence and motivation to join their course to go ahead with a career switch.”
Today, Mahesh works as an Associate Software Engineer in Streamline Healthcare Solutions (India) Pvt. Ltd. at Whitefield, Bengaluru that delivers web-based software for health care organization’s to provide, manage, and coordinate all types of service delivery processes.
His course in big data and Hadoop at AcadGild has helped him become an active member of the Hortonworks community that focuses on the development and support of Apache Hadoop, a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers.
Mahesh very proudly adds, “I am already a recipient of six different badges from the Hortonworks community for resolving group members’ issues, but I still find the need to improve my skills.”
He strongly recommends the course. “This course has helped me understand the basics of big data and Hadoop technology, and is very learner-friendly. The web site’s dashboard has all the necessary information about the course and assignment submissions that helps students keep a track of their assignments.”
Mahesh is on the verge of completing the course in Big Data and Hadoop with AcadGild and has already found success. He wishes to climb higher in the Hadoop domain in the future, to make the most of this career switch.
In AcadGild’s Big Data and Hadoop Development course, learners will be guided through basic, intermediate, and advanced concepts of the Hadoop ecosystem: Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) file system, MapReduce programming model, YARN, Spark, Pig, Hive, Oozie, Flume, and Sqoop.
We believe that the best way to learn anything is to actually do it. Learners will be mentored on two hands-on data analysis projects through the course.